One of the very first introductions to all things bird dog controversy a new bird dog owner will get is the great dispute over training bird dogs. I don’t mean which guru or which method. I mean whether you should train a bird dog at all. Some will indeed tell you emphatically that you don’t need to “train” (in the sense of teaching something) your bird dog, but rather that you should just take your dog out and simply let it do what it does naturally: hunt. That confused me …

Exactly one year ago today, we met our badass goofball of a bird dog for the first time. We were very nervous. Some of our best friends met us at O’Hare after our connecting flight to Peoria got delayed and drove us there in single digit temps and light snow swirling and drifting over the dark and largely vacant country highway ...